Life was as normal as it could be during the hot summer of 1906 in Alabama. The poor were getting more poverty stricken while the rich struggled to maintain what they had. Virginia Foster Durr remembers, “on Saturday mornings, these families would come into Birmingham, walking, there was no paved...

Louis A. Godey's enormously successful Godey's Lady's Book set the standard for the American magazine and monthlie publishers throughout the mid 19th century. His ingenious marketing techniques as noted by historian John Tebbel set the standard for magazines by 1850. The market appeal of Godey's Lady's Book contributed to the rising realization that women...

Can you imagine the United States without gas stations? Almost every main road today is littered with these familiar sights, all with similar architecture and design. It is hard to imagine life without these small stores, both for filling up with gasoline and for grabbing other small items. But it has not always been this way. For people living in the early 1900s, these modern fixtures...

The picture above shows a group of men tearing up a Birmingham city street in 1909. At first glance this picture might seem innocent enough. These men could very well be day laborers just trying to make enough money to get by. However, they are, in fact, prisoners who had been leased to a private company which Birmingham was paying to do...

The Flint Sit-Down Strike was an event that “mobilized as many as 5,000 workers” supported by thousands more of the city’s residents against General Motors for “44 winter days,” (Faires, 121). Rev. Dr. Edmund A. Walsh, S. J., a priest and vice president of Georgetown University, labelled the strike as “an attempt at collective grand larceny,” that was inspired by Soviet techniques...

The history behind the Alma College mascot began with the student-run newspaper, The Almanian, which ran a series of stories over a three week period in 1931 asking the students of Alma college to participate in a contest to come up with a new school mascot to replace the then current one: the Fighting Presbyterians.

Following the stock market crash of October and the resulting American economic collapse, Maryland families were left haphazardly arrayed on a financial spectrum starting with “making do” and ending with scrounging. Wives and mothers often managed the day to day expenditures within families and those in the newly reduced middle class adapted and reframed the economic decisions that they made....

Zora Neale Hurston’s expedition to a Turpentine camp in Cross City, Florida was much more exciting and informative than it sounds. Hurston described the start of her trip in an essay she wrote on her experience there as, “going up some roads and down some others to see what Negroes do for a living.” 1 Hurston exclaimed that to an outsider, these African Americans worked at a Turpentine still,...

In the summer of 1938, the Detroit Housing Commission took over management of Detroit's first public housing projects designed by the Public Works Administration. The project held two different residental areas: Parkside Homes for white people, and Brewster Homes for black people. Eugene P. Opperman was named Resident Manager of Parkside and George A. Isabell was named Resident Manager of Brewster....